How To Polish AI-Generated Copy You’re Happy To Publish | Brafton

If you’re using AI to create marketing copy, or any text, all the power to you. But your Spider-Sense should be tingling at all times. With great power comes great responsibility — the responsibility to polish AI-generated copy so that it’s fit for publishing.

There is nary a use case where sending unaltered AI-created copy straight to your audience is reasonable. For internal or personal purposes? OK. But professional applications demand the same attention to detail, thorough proofing and editing you’d provide an entry-level writer.

Here are five tips for polishing AI-generated text before you hit publish.

1. Know Your AI-Isms

To an untrained (or unconcerned) eye, most AI-generated copy today sounds completely OK — “OK” being the keyword here. Non-writers or busy professionals who just need copy now might look at the output and think, “It’s grammatically correct and I understand it. This is fine by me.” But your audience may react differently, especially if they’re used to seeing AI-generated copy and can call out its isms quickly.

AI learns from writers, and I’ll be the first to admit that every time a new AI-ism starts trending, it can sometimes hurt. Exhibit A: the em dash backlash. Writers have long loved the punctuation for its versatility, and are now instructed on multiple fronts to remove it from their completely original copy so readers won’t think it’s AI. Next thing you know, AI will cease using em dashes and we’ll be told to re-insert them in our work. Always doing the opposite of generative AI is not a world I want to live in. That said, it’s unnecessary to completely remove all of these common patterns before you hit publish, but they’re good to be aware of at the very least, so you can judge for yourself what looks fine and what needs changing:

• Formulaic introductions: AI has a way of introducing sentences or ideas in the same formulaic ways, no matter what you tell it to do. “In today’s fast-paced digital world…”; “As technology continues to evolve…”. Cut the throat-clearing and start with a bold claim, question or vivid image instead.
• Things in threes: AI often chunks things into threes at the end of a sentence, i.e., “X, Y, and Z.” This is actually called the rule of three, and it’s something many writers were taught to do. But AI tends to overuse the principle, so be aware of that.
• Word choice: There are some common terms AI uses: “powerful,” “comprehensive,” “innovative,” “effective,” “essential” and “crucial,” to name a few. Instead of these, choose specific adjectives tied to context.
• Cliches: AI uses cliches because cliches — by definition — are overused. LLMs eat up that data and think, “This is popular. This will hit home.” Even in manual writing, it’s best to avoid overused phrases. Keep an eye out for them and, where necessary, rewrite cliches with a more compelling metaphor or other figure of speech.

2. Read Your Copy Aloud (Instead of Using AI Detectors)

It’s no secret anymore that most AI checkers aren’t very accurate. A select few sing the praises of some detectors, like Turnitin, but that’s more designed for academic applications anyway. The free options don’t really compare.

It’s not enough to paste your copy into one of these tools, have it tell you it sounds robotic, human or a mixture of both, and then edit (or not) accordingly. If you’re in the pits of a busy day or drowning in deadlines, skimming AI copy and signing off feels way too easy.

For a more practical approach, read through the text aloud, slowly and with your critical thinking hat on. How does it sound? If it’s fresh off your AI tool interface, chances are it reads as such, and hearing it can help you recognize that quickly and generate inspiration on how you’d say something differently. When those moments of realization spark, write them down!

3. Ask AI To Be Devil’s Advocate

This tip shouldn’t replace manual review of your AI-generated copy, but it can be a fun exercise that puts the piece into perspective, especially if you need a peer review and there’s no one around at that moment to help out.

Paste the copy into ChatGPT (or whatever chat-style tool you prefer), and prompt it to, “Act like a skeptical reader and argue with this text. What feels off or inauthentic?”

It should then call out points in its own copy to consider that might throw readers off or cause them to question your content. Take what you find helpful from its advice and apply it to your next draft.

4. Remove Passive Voice

Passive voice is among AI’s most common patterns, at least in my experience. After all, it is a passive technology — accepting what you do to it, endlessly pliable and trying hard to comply with requests in its responses. But passive voice is seldom a better choice than active voice, so be aware of what it looks like and flip those passive remarks into active ones.

Examples of passive voice:

• “It is often said that…”
• “It can be seen that…”
• “Results were achieved through careful planning.”

To make these active, have the subject act, instead of undergoing an action. To make these examples active, you would say:

• “Marketers say…”
• “We saw…”
• “The team achieved results through careful planning.”

5. Breath Some Air Into the Text

AI rarely uses negative space. No pauses, no intentional brevity. Everything is filled with connective text that can become exhausting to read, even if it’s expected. But readers need time to ponder, interpret and reflect on what they’ve just read — that’s part of the experience!

Your AI-generated text probably has walls of filler with no room for the reader to breathe. While you’re polishing, don’t just delete unnecessary text, introduce strategic and creative line breaks, use ellipses and ask questions — things that allow readers to digest the content as they go and not get so exhausted that they close their tab before you’ve even gotten to your key takeaway or CTA.

Polish Takes Practice

Polishing AI-generated content, like most things, takes practice. It feels a bit different than editing human-created work, but similar in the sense that when you get to know its patterns and preferences (like each human writer has), it becomes easier. But even when it feels easy, don’t let your guard down. Give yourself enough time with each project to do a proper pass, polishing it to a point where you don’t second guess yourself once it goes live.

Note: This article was originally published on contentmarketing.ai.